Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  “Come on, darling,” she says, hoisting me — pushing my arms up where they don’t want to go, twisting my poor body this way and that.

  “What didn’t you —”

  She has a hard time with the rope. It won’t go though, she tries again and again, and I am useless, my legs and arms are dull as sandbags.

  “There you are, darling,” she says at last, and I am jerked up in the air. I thud against the walls, torqued like a dummy being hoisted onto a truck. Then I am even again with the ground, and snow bites the bare skin of my chest, and the brightness blinds me for a time. I collapse, get hauled up, collapse again, stumble finally, clutching the shoulders of two other cursing fannigans.

  On the ground, as we wobble past, I make out the body of poor Witherspoon, frozen solid blue in the winter wind.

  Twelve

  “Excuse me,” I said after I’d pushed open the office door. I had my portfolio under my arm, my hat in my hand. I’d been wandering for some minutes along a warren of dull offices scattered on the third floor of an old stone building on Peel Street. “Is this the Barnesworth Agency?”

  There was no sign on the door, but the number, 317, matched the one I’d copied from Gil Jenkins’s folded note.

  The small, dark-panelled waiting room was dominated by a hulking desk on which perched a monstrous black typewriter. The little woman behind it in glasses and severe suit seemed dwarfed by the desk and typewriter both. She looked at me in silence too long.

  “And you are?” she said eventually.

  “Ramsay Crome,” I said, and stepped towards her. I put down my portfolio and thrust out my hand. “I’m a commercial artist, and I heard that you might have a position. I can do oils, watercolours, pen and ink, any kind of sketching. I’m very good with lettering, even drafting —”

  She had not moved from behind the safety of her desk, and my hand stayed absurdly in mid-air until I let it drop.

  “I’ve brought some samples of my work,” I said, and started untying my large case.

  “We’re terrifically busy at the moment,” she said. The office looked completely deserted except for the two of us. But doors to the right and left might have led to busy though silent inner workings, I supposed. The one low couch along the far wall was empty.

  “Perhaps if I could just speak to Mr. Barnesworth,” I said. “Or I’d be happy to make an appointment. My work has appeared in catalogues, in magazines, in newspapers.” I pulled out a colour drawing I’d done before the crash: The Way Ahead Is Unlimited. It showed a handsome and hard-muscled prospector kneeling by a river to inspect the bedrock exposed by the current. Canada’s mining industry grew 10.5% in 1928 over 1927, with greater years bound to come for those with the courage to invest! it said.

  The little woman pushed up her glasses and scanned the figure of the miner.

  “I’ve also done some architectural sketches, some portraits of children and dogs.”

  “What about women?”

  “Yes, I’ve done some fashion things.” I sorted through my materials to find a series of pen and ink sketches of women in hats. She flipped through them as if gazing at a particularly uninspiring hand of cards.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Barnesworth is not in,” she said abruptly. She handed back my sketches and readjusted her glasses. “Perhaps if you left your card.”

  I had no such thing, but made a motion to check through my pockets anyway. “I’m afraid I seem to have left the house without —”

  “That’s fine. If anything comes up I can certainly contact you,” she said, and started clattering away on her typewriter as if I’d already left the room.

  “But how could you contact me —”

  Her eyes stayed on the carbon-copied form that she was typing up at a noisy and prodigious rate.

  “I see then,” I said, and slammed the door behind me. I steamed out of the building and got several blocks away when it started to rain. Then I turned and sprinted back to the building and up the stairs again.

  “Listen here,” I said when I burst back into the office. “You’ve treated me very badly and —”

  The woman was gone from her desk, the typewriter sat abandoned, and another woman, a nurse, was sitting with her legs crossed on the couch that had been empty. Both other doors remained closed. The nurse had lustrous black hair, blood red lips and skin that looked softer than brushed silk. She glanced up at me, faintly amused. Her uniform was terribly tight, and her legs, even to her stocking tops, were clearly visible.

  “You’re not the same fellow as last time,” she said.

  “And you’re not the same girl,” I quipped in confusion. “A woman was here just a few minutes ago behind this desk —”

  “Miss Dorsett?” the nurse said. “She’ll be back shortly, I’m sure.”

  How quickly my anger drained into renewed awkwardness. I shook the rainwater off my hat and remained standing, my portfolio in hand, although I could have sat beside the young woman on the couch. After a minute or so I doubled over into a terrible coughing fit.

  “Are you a new artist?” she asked when I finally recovered enough to look at her again.

  “I’m an artist. I don’t know how new I am.”

  She shifted in her seat and recrossed her legs, then cut me a dazzling smile like something out of the movies.

  Miss Dorsett came through the door on the right then, a stack of papers pressed to her trim chest. “You’re back,” she said to me, without emotion. And then, to the young nurse she said, “David’s not here. I don’t know where he’s gone. This is the third day he’s done this to me.”

  “You could check the bottom of a bottle,” the nurse said.

  “Listen here!” I said. “You were terribly rude to me just now. You said that you would let me know when Mr. Barnesworth got back and yet you didn’t even take my particulars —”

  The nurse started laughing, her raised leg jiggling prettily with the effort. Even Miss Dorsett’s face lightened.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “There is no Mr. Barnesworth,” the nurse said.

  I looked from her to Miss Dorsett, who put down the stack of papers on her desk.

  “There’s a reason why you’re here,” Miss Dorsett said, pointing at me.

  I stood dripping on the floor, trying to figure out what I’d landed in.

  “You’re here,” she said, “because David is not.” She kept pointing her finger.

  “I like him better than David,” the nurse said.

  “Yes, but David is very good,” Miss Dorsett said. “Are you very good?” she asked me.

  “Is this an audition?”

  I followed the two of them through the door on the left into a dark studio space. A roughly constructed frame for what looked like an elevator door stood absurdly on a small platform. Against the wall was a workbench, crammed with tubes of paint and jars of brushes, with an easel leaning against it. A row of pre-stretched empty canvasses stood in shadows against the wall.

  “You can see the set-up that David has been working on,” Miss Dorsett said. “We pay the models by the hour, so don’t take forever. Elizabeth, is there anything you need? I can bring some coffee, if you like.”

  I glanced around again at the elevator frame, the workbench, the small platform.

  “No, thank you,” Elizabeth said.

  Miss Dorsett left us alone. I turned my gaze to the beautiful Elizabeth — except for a poutiness that would take over her face sometimes, she was ravishing — and leaned my portfolio against the workbench.

  “You would like . . . a portrait, is that it?” I asked doubtfully.

  “It’s whatever you want to do,” Elizabeth said. She could see my confusion and seemed in no hurry to clarify the assignment.

  “Is it an advertisement for nursing?”

  “I never know what it’s for, exactly,” Elizabeth said. “Nobody tells me anything.”

  “But you’re not a nurse.”

  “No. Sometimes I’m a secretar
y, sometimes I’m in my swimsuit and we make a little beach.” She batted her eyes at me, enjoying my predicament. Finally, and mercifully, she said, “It’s for calendars, of course. And knowing David, he would probably want the hem of my dress caught in the elevator doors, and the caption would read something like, ‘On your way up, Nurse Jones?’”

  “Ah,” I said, finally starting to imagine it.

  “Of course you could do anything you wanted.”

  “Let’s see what that would look like.” I positioned her by the flimsy fake elevator doors. I tried several times but they wouldn’t stay shut firmly enough to keep a grip on her hem.

  “David usually has some broken coat hangers,” Elizabeth said. And sure enough on the workbench I found an old tobacco tin holding various lengths and shapes of coat hanger wire. I picked out a couple and went back to where I’d left her standing by the elevator doors. Then for the next while I fumbled with the wire to hitch up her hem. But nothing would stay.

  “You could run a long one from the top of the door frame,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes,” I said, and thought about it some more.

  My bunk. Collins and the others rub my nearly frozen hands and feet and ply me with warm tea, soup and biscuit gathered from private stocks.

  “No Kranke!” I say, almost delirious. I can’t let Herr Doktor at me again.

  I can’t stand to pee. Collins brings the bucket close to my bunk, and I lean on him and Napier when the deed must be done.

  “At least that part didn’t freeze off,” Napier quips.

  Muster is called, and if I’m not on Kranke I must be on my feet. So they carry me out, shivering wildly still, lungs torn from coughing. I link arms with Napier and Richardson and hang somehow between them, my feet nominally on the ground. The wind rattles me like a sheet of roofing tin, set to fall the moment someone lets go.

  Agony blathers on. I look around desperately for Margaret. She could stand behind me and heat the whole earth, and I could fall into her arms.

  “Anyone who won’t work for the Fatherland,” Collins translates, “will not get any more cream or pumpkin pie. And don’t laugh, or I might be next after Crome!”

  Poor Collins looks bent as an old stick. And there’s no Margaret. My heart races as if I’m sprinting up a hill, but nothing is warm. My blood feels like ice water.

  I’m not going to survive. The certainty of it slowly takes away everything — fear, worry, sense, nonsense. Only a few things are real: these arms holding me up, the cold earth underfoot, the blackness coming on. Hurry, I think.

  But it won’t. Everything takes forever, even this.

  Then I am in my bunk again. At last Margaret is stroking my forehead. She is older somehow. She looks as if everything has been taken from her as well. When she speaks she has Collins’s voice.

  “I might be able to arrange a transfer,” she says. “But you’ll have to be able to walk on your own. It’s either that or Kranke.”

  “No Kranke,” I whisper.

  No Kranke, but I can barely work. My shovel tip bounces off the frozen ground and dislodges mere chips at a time. Mostly I lean on the shovel, trying to angle myself out of the killing wind. I have woollen socks on my hands, and they have found me an old scarf of Witherspoon’s to wind around my face.

  “It’ll be better in Münster,” Collins says to me.

  He hunches like an ancient woman, wrapped in Wither-spoon’s blanket. Our shovels come upon a rock too big to move. We slide the tips along the edges and tilt, slide and tilt. Termites could make more progress.

  “It’s pretty cushy there,” Collins says. “Two wood stoves in every barracks. Latrines that work.”

  The scrape, scrape of metal on rock.

  “And it’s not just for you. Napier, Fines, Wilkens — I’m arranging it for a bunch of us. Before we die here in this jolly field.”

  Even in the socks my fingers feel as dead as the wooden handle they’re gripping. No — death wouldn’t ache like this. Death would be a glorious shroud of nothing.

  “But we need to sweeten the pot for Agony and Blasphemy. Fines has those marks his sister sent him wrapped in the fruit bread, and we’ve pooled all the bully beef, razor blades, soap and chocolate we can find. Anything you have, Crome, will be helpful. Are you following me?”

  Scrape, scrape, but the rock is welded into the hard-brick soil. Termites would be sleeping now, down in the ground. They’d be eggs waiting for spring.

  “Two blankets for every bed in Münster. And soft work. Captain Fielding was telling me. But we have to be smart about it. Are you listening?”

  The rock moves a little bit. So we pull back our shovels, then dig in harder. It’s impossible not to. Just human nature. If the rock will move, then we must move it.

  “I can do them both a drawing,” I say, my teeth clattering.

  “It’s not what David would have done,” Miss Dorsett said in a critical tone. She was looking at my painting of Elizabeth. In the end I’d forgotten the elevator completely and just rendered her leaning back against the high stool, her long legs crossed at the ankles, the nurse’s uniform straining at the chest.

  “I’m not David,” I said.

  “No, clearly you’re not.”

  Elizabeth had gone by this time. Miss Dorsett and I were standing in the deserted studio looking at my work, still wet on the easel. I’d lost track of the time and felt quite hungry and weak all of a sudden. I’d had no lunch. I was aware too that my throat was burning and I’d soon be coughing if I didn’t get something warm to drink.

  Miss Dorsett didn’t take her eyes off the painting. “What is she about to say?”

  “Does there have to be a caption?”

  “Usually. She looks either as though she’s about to slap you or invite you to bed. Or maybe one after the other?” Miss Dorsett took her eyes off the painting then and looked at me. “You didn’t find that expression on Elizabeth’s face, did you?” Miss Dorsett looked back at the work. “And that isn’t quite her face. Which is fine. You’ve done more with it. You do love women.” She turned her glasses on me again. So many men don’t. They think they do, but they haven’t the slightest idea.”

  The statement hung in the air between us. Obviously a reply was expected. But the wrong word might ruin everything. For a moment I felt as if I wouldn’t be able to breathe if I didn’t get this job.

  I stayed quiet and returned her gaze.

  “I can pay you ninety-five dollars a month, Mr. Crome,” she said. “I’m sorry it’s not more. All the paintings become the property of the agency. There is a little more studio space here in the office. You aren’t a drinker, are you? I’d hate to think I’d brought in another David. One is all I can handle. There is one other thing.”

  “Yes?” The air felt pushed out of the room, but I didn’t want to let on.

  “The models come through me, and if you touch one of them, if you behave in any way that is ungentlemanly or unprofessional — ”

  “I’m a married man, Miss Dorsett!”

  “Many married men have fallen from grace, Mr. Crome. How is your wife going to react when you tell her you’re working for a pin-up agency?”

  A cough threatened to take me over. I turned away and gave into it for a time before willing my body back under control.

  “Ninety-five dollars a month is a little low,” I managed to say.

  “We’ll see how your work sells.” Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t look like the kind of man who has dozens of other options at the moment.”

  I stiffened at the remark and she caught it. “I’m sorry,” she said without hesitation, and her face softened. “I can’t pay you more for now, but you’re very skilled and it really would be an honour if you could join us. May I call you Ramsay?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “And you are — ?”

  “Miss Dorsett,” she said, then her smile returned. “Dorothy, to you.”

  Alone in the crowded barracks, trying to live off the meager body heat
of thirty-three of us packed together, I open Margaret’s letter. According to Napier’s faulty wristwatch it’s three minutes to nine, which means three minutes till the one pitiful electric light is shut off for the night.

  And this is her first letter in ages. My eyes begin to leak even before I can extract the page.

  Dearest Ramsay,

  I hope and trust that this letter finds you well. I am sorry I have been such an inconstant correspondent. I have no excuses — I was not ill or suddenly pressed into consuming war work. What I can say I suppose is that

  I lost my way for a time and blundered about in a sort of self-induced darkness, as many people have I suspect in this war. It’s the unrelenting nature of it: we are pressed in on all sides by the poverty of our food and the awful jingoism of our news — framed forever in the appalling lists of the dead which assault us daily — and the dreadfully frantic way the young men strut and career about the town like fruit flies set to expire within the hour. I’m sorry, but years of this, and perhaps of paying too particular attention, smothered me like a black curtain. It is nothing, I know, compared to the gas and bombs and bullets and the hard cruelty of capture, all of which you have faced.

  Yet it very nearly defeated me. I feel so dreadfully ashamed and unworthy.

  But I can tell you that I have been comforted and am more myself, like the old self you knew (back when you knew me). One might even say I have been brought back to life. And of course it was Boulton — my dear Henry — who knows me better than any man and whose gentle nature and steadfastness have buoyed me no end.

  There is no easy way to say this now, but to simply write it: Henry and I were married last month. It was a small and sober affair, in keeping with wartime. But joyful — so very joyful for me and for Henry — and I know you will wish us well. We are living here with Mother and Father until Henry has secured a promotion in his office.

  Thank you, dearest Ramsay, for your understanding and friendship, I dare say for your love. If you had seen me in my darkest days you would be happy for me now, for I really was in a kind of prison (and how unworthy I feel writing such words to you, of all people), a strange melancholy that pressed me until I could hardly catch a solid breath.